The real reason Mike Pence is going down

As it becomes more clear that Donald Trump is’t going to survive his criminal scandals and isn’t going to finish his term, Mike Pence has become more aggressive in his political moves. He’s begun bolstering his political staff, including trying to hire anti-Trump Republicans. He’s thrown Trump under the bus in the Ronny Jackson scandal. But Pence isn’t going to survive this either, and there’s a specific reason that he’s going down as well.

We were reminded of that reason when we learned this week that Michael Cohen and Michael Flynn held a meeting at Trump Tower with an alleged Qatari briber. What does this have to do with Mike Pence? The same thing that Jared Kushner’s meeting with a Russian bank, Michael Flynn’s phone calls to the Russian Ambassador, and a whole host of other dirty antics have to do with Mike Pence: they all took place during the transition period.

Chris Christie was briefly in charge of the Trump transition team, until he was ousted, and replaced by Mike Pence. Nearly all of the transition period antics took place while Pence was in charge of the transition team. That alone doesn’t prove that Pence was aware of any of it; he could claim that it was all being kept from him. But late last year we learned that Special Counsel Robert Mueller long ago seized all of the Trump transition team emails. So Mueller already knows what happened.

Perhaps more importantly, Mike Pence has known all along that those transition team emails were going to come into play eventually. He’s spent the past year and a half lying to the public in the hope of preventing the Trump-Russia scandal to unfold. Now that things have gotten particularly ugly, he suddenly called over the weekend for the investigation to be shut down. Pence is acting guilty. That means he knows Mueller has him nailed with regard to the transition period.